Thursday, October 9, 2014

Wildlife refuge plans show strengths and weaknesses for adaptation to climate change

EurekAlert via the American Institute of Biological Sciences: As the effects of a changing climate become acute, organizations charged with overseeing refuge areas must take action to adapt. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) maintains the National Wildlife Refuge System, which constitutes world's largest system of protected lands and waters. According to a November BioScience article by Robert Fischman and Vicky Meretsky of Indiana University and their coauthors, the service may not always be adequately planning for an altered future, but best practices from several plans point the way for improvement. For instance, existing plans that enlarge the conservation scope of refuges by promoting wildlife corridors show how conservation reserves can simultaneously improve habitat, reduce nonclimate impacts, and enhance resilience to climate change.

The authors undertook a study of 185 USFWS comprehensive conservation plans published from 2005 to 2011 and evaluated their coverage of nine climate-change categories. Of the 185 plans, 115 (62%) mentioned at least one of the climate-change categories; of these, only 73 included prescriptions for adaptation. Moreover, the percentage of plans with climate-change prescriptions actually dropped in 2011, after steadily rising in each of the previous five years.

When prescriptions were present, they tended to be focused on monitoring that did not include specific criteria for action, rather than on monitoring with action criteria or on adaptive responses, themselves. This can be a result of managers' desire to maintain flexibility in the face of uncertainty, but the authors argue that "without specific criteria for evaluating success, refuge managers will have difficulty knowing whether and how to adjust activities on the basis of monitoring."

Despite some shortcomings of existing comprehensive conservation plans, the authors see cause for hope in the USFWS's 2013 strategic plan, which calls for reviews that will bring together multiple refuge-level plans in order to produce wider-scale "landscape conservation designs." These landscape conservation designs will allow reserve managers collectively to make a greater contribution to climate-change adaptation than they otherwise could. As the authors put it, "coordinating the actions of a disparate collection of reserves so that they achieve more together than each can independently is, after all, the whole point of having a conservation system."...

Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana, USA, in the Sherburne Complex Wildlife Management Area, a Nature Conservancy reserve. US Army Corps of Engineers photo

June 2009 – At the studios of Cleanskies TV, I was interviewed about the costs of climate change, and discussed adaptation efforts underway in the US and around the world.

May 2009 – I helped draft the scenarios for Rising Waters, a multistakeholder scenarios effort focused on climate change adaptation in the Hudson Valley. The final report is now completed and available here.

May 2008 – I reviewed two books on climate and energy in the New Leader magazine: James Gustave Speth's The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, plus Robert Bryce's Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence.

January 2008 – A very local paper covers a very global issue.... The Litchfield County Times in northwestern Connectictut ran an article in January 2008 about Carbon-Based.

Now available: Climate Change Adaptation in 2011

A selection of my writings from 2011, plus some of my posts, as well as links... all focusing on the risks of climate change